An Arabic teacher keeps $6.70 of a $10 lesson
Platforms publish two numbers separately and never multiply them for you: the average price of a lesson in each language, and the commission they take. Put them together and you get the number a teacher actually cares about.
Everything below uses Preply’s own published figures, read on 24 August 2026 — their stated average price per language, and their stated commission of 33% for a new tutor, dropping to 28% after 20 hours taught, within a published band of 18–33%. The multiplication is ours and is labelled as ours. Take any of it and use it; no credit required.
What reaches the teacher
| Language | Student pays (avg) | New tutor keeps (33%) | After 20 h (28%) | At the 18% floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Norwegian | $39.00 | $26.13 | $28.08 | $31.98 |
| Italian | $23.00 | $15.41 | $16.56 | $18.86 |
| French | $21.00 | $14.07 | $15.12 | $17.22 |
| Russian | $21.00 | $14.07 | $15.12 | $17.22 |
| Japanese | $19.00 | $12.73 | $13.68 | $15.58 |
| Spanish | $17.00 | $11.39 | $12.24 | $13.94 |
| Turkish | $16.00 | $10.72 | $11.52 | $13.12 |
| Chinese | $14.00 | $9.38 | $10.08 | $11.48 |
| Arabic | $10.00 | $6.70 | $7.20 | $8.20 |
Read the Arabic row. The platform’s own stated average is $10 an hour; a new tutor keeps $6.70 of it. The Norwegian row is the same arithmetic on a much larger number: $39 becomes $26.13.
The 18% floor is real but should not be read as the normal case. It is the bottom of a band the platform describes as depending on total hours taught, and the only step it names explicitly is the one at 20 hours. Treat the 33% and 28% columns as where most teachers actually live.
The part the table cannot show
Preply’s help centre states that the commission for every trial lesson with a new student is 100%. Not reduced — the whole thing. The tutor is paid nothing for the first lesson with each new student, and the platform states this covers the cost of offering free replacements to students who are not satisfied.
That mechanic does not reduce your rate; it multiplies against your churn. A teacher whose students stay for months barely feels it. A teacher who meets many students who do not continue can give away a substantial share of their teaching hours, and none of it appears in any advertised rate.
We are not going to put a number on that, because it would require a conversion rate we do not have and would be a guess dressed as data. The structural point stands on its own: if you teach on a platform with an unpaid trial, your true hourly earnings are a function of how many first lessons you give, and that is a number only you can compute from your own record.
The other platforms, and the row that costs us
Wyzant takes 25%, so a tutor keeps 75% — and 0% on students the tutor referred themselves, who therefore pay the tutor in full. That is better than our own 5% on self-brought students, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it later. Two qualifiers from their own pages: students pay a further 9% service fee on every lesson, and a Social Security Number is required to be paid at all, which excludes most of the world.
italki, AmazingTalker, Cambly, Lingoda, Superprof and Verbling are deliberately absent. Their commissions are widely reported by teachers but we could not confirm them on a page those companies publish themselves, and a number we cannot stand behind does not belong in a table. The reasoning for each is on our fee comparison. italki is the one worth reading in full: its own Teacher Policy states no rate, and ties the fee to the teacher’s “overall performance” — what that means, and what to check before moving platform.
KoloLingo takes 15%, and a teacher’s tier never changes that rate; students a teacher brings themselves are 5%, fixed at the moment of booking. There is no trial mechanic, so the first lesson pays exactly like the fiftieth. We are not putting a row in the table above, because our teachers set their own prices — the honest comparison is what each platform leaves you at an identical student price, not a number we could arrange to flatter ourselves.
Method, and how to check it
Average prices are Preply’s own, stated on each language’s tutor page and read on 24 August 2026. Commission figures, the 20-hour step and the 100% trial commission are from Preply’s own help centre. Take-home columns are those averages multiplied by 0.67, 0.72 and 0.82 — our arithmetic on their published rates.
Two caveats worth carrying if you reuse this. These pages are personalised by location, so the average you are shown may differ from the one we were. And an average is not a wage: it describes the catalogue, not any individual teacher, and a tutor who sets their price well above the average keeps proportionally more.
Where the student-side figures come from, including the country-by-country breakdowns, is set out in the price dataset.
We run a marketplace for language teachers, so treat this as interested rather than neutral. The defence is the same as on the price page: none of the figures are ours, every one is checkable on someone else’s site, and the comparison that beats us is in the text rather than left out of it. Corrections to hello@kololingo.com and we will publish who corrected us.